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Democrat trashes his party's House leaders

San Diego Mayor Bob Filner, who resigned from Congress earlier this month, took pointed shots at House Democratic leaders in an interview Wednesday, and said Democrats have not done enough to reach out to veterans.

“They keep their control by intimidation,” said Filner, a liberal Democrat who had served in the House since 1993 before winning the mayoralty in November. In an interview with KPCC, the NPR affiliate for Southern California, Filner accused longtime members of Congress of “hazing” newcomers and stifling dissent.

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“These guys would sort of judge freshmen by the time it took them to figure out where the private dining room was,” he says. “It was like a hazing thing. So if you don’t tell somebody that you can eat with your colleagues, what are you going to tell them about how to get floor time or how they get a bill passed?”

As a freshman, Filner said, he tried to organize a meeting of progressive first-termers. Members of House leadership found out and scheduled a counter-meeting, he said. In 2007, when Filner successfully ran for the chairmanship of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, he claimed to be the only incoming committee chair who had to round up votes.

“The leadership does to the Democrats what Republicans do to us in elections,” he told the radio station. “They divide and conquer.”

Meanwhile, Filner also said Democrats never understood how powerful veterans’ issues could resonate, and chalked up a 65 percent increase in funding for veterans’ programs during his tenure as committee chair to headlines surrounding the Walter Reed scandal.

“They just didn’t seem to understand that this was a constituency that was ours if we showed that we cared,” Filner said.

Filner’s ire wasn’t limited to his own party. He called Congress “dysfunctional” on the whole, and said there was “no reaching across the aisle” with tea party Republicans who “had no respect” for government. While he resigned because he felt he could do more as mayor, he indicated he would miss one thing: the view from his office in the Capitol.

“In the evening when it’s lit up, my heart was like this, it was fluttering,” Filner said. “And I figured I should leave when it stopped fluttering. But it never did.”